Lakeland woman gets 15 years in prison for stealing about $850,000 from employer

By Suzie Schottelkotte The Ledger

Thursday

Feb 11, 2016 at 11:46 AM

Judy Hulcher was sentenced today to 15 years in prison for stealing about $850,000 from her employer, Payne Air Conditioning & Heating in Lakeland.

BARTOW — Judy Hulcher was sentenced to 15 years in prison Thursday for stealing nearly $850,000 from her employer, Payne Air/Conditioning & Heating in Lakeland, over four years.

Hulcher, 58, of Lakeland, was the company’s treasurer during the time she was taking the money, and Circuit Judge Reinaldo Ojeda said that’s what bothered him most about the case.

“You were a corporate officer, a treasurer,” he said Thursday. “Almost 100 people depended on you to steer the company’s finances, and you completely let them down. The only thing that caused this to stop was essentially getting caught.”

Hulcher’s lawyer, Ron Toward, said she spent the money to satisfy her gambling addiction, which was encouraged through the state’s efforts to market the lottery.

“This isn’t a situation where someone went out and stole so they could go out and have a good time and party high,” he said. “This is a person who succumbed to a gambling addition that was fed by the very entity that’s prosecuting her — the state of Florida.”

He said Hulcher has accepted responsibility for stealing the money from the beginning, when the company’s owner, Frank Lansford, confronted her about it.

“She has never denied responsibility,” Toward said.

Bartow psychologist Tracy Hartig testified Thursday that Hulcher rationalized her actions by saying she would repay the company when she won big. She said Hulcher kept a log of the money she took so she would know how much to repay.

But Lansford said Hulcher never repaid any of it, and the ongoing theft nearly brought his company to its financial knees.

“I truly think she would have forced our company into bankruptcy had I not discovered this when I did,” he said during Thursday’s sentencing hearing. “We were forced to lay off staff, people went years without raises or bonuses and many had to take pay cuts just to keep the business afloat. During this time, we had employees that lost homes and had cars repossessed, and none of this concerned her enough to stop.

“She did this while coming to work every day,” he said, “looking myself and other company workers in the eyes as if nothing was wrong.”

A jury convicted Hulcher of grand theft in December, but found her not guilty of money laundering charges, rejecting the state’s argument that she had attempted to conceal the source of the money when buying the lottery tickets.

Ojeda could have sentenced Hulcher to as little as 21 months in prison or a maximum of 30 years, based on the state’s sentencing guidelines.

“This company was betrayed,” he told her Thursday. “You betrayed trust, you betrayed friendship over a four-year period.”

In addition to the prison term, Ojeda ordered Hulcher to serve 15 years’ probation after her release from prison and to pay $849,561 in restitution.

— Suzie Schottelkotte can be reached at suzie.schottelkotte@theledger.com or 863-533-9070. Follow her on Twitter @southpolkscene.

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